Exhibition: 23rd November to 26th January 2013
Maddox Arts is delighted to announce the latest solo exhibition of work by British sculptor Julian Wild. Fear of Geometry is emblematic of the transgressions made in British sculpture since Herbert Read first coined ‘the geometry of fear’ to describe the preoccupations of a new generations of British sculptors in the aftermath of the Second World War. That generation of sculptors; including Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick and Elisabeth Frink found the rendering of industrial metals instead of the stone and wood of their predecessors necessary in describing the paranoia of a new atomic age and the artist’s uncertain role within it.
Conversely in 2012 we find Julian Wild’s sculpture seeking to describe a paranoia emanating directly from the artist’s own apprehension toward the supposed virtues of linearity. In Deadly Nightashade we witness this uneasiness in a complex web of organic forms; deriving from a singular orientation, parallel limbs threaten to converge but resist, each obeying its own tropic pull. A spectrum of phosphorescent colour flows along the object’s outgrowth, an amorphous rash indicative of its restless mutations.
In Right Angled Ragwort we see the perfect symmetry of a right angle augmented by a serpentine contortion at its juncture. Through this entanglement we are can glimpse the piece’s verisimilitude and in its geometry’s resolution we can understand the deterministic unwavering of organic growth.
The artist has suggested that it is the physical praxis of working with malleable metals that lend these works their spontaneity; mutations evolve through their own serendipity, with each appendage the form’s eventual outcome is reconsidered and from each aperture new forms are suggested.
